News
Spills, Chills and Shills
Aug 24, 2010, Terrace Standard (Read article on originating site site)
By Rob Brown - Terrace Standard
Published: August 24, 2010 11:00 PM
Read this article on the Terrace Standard website
A few weeks ago I was at my workbench building a fly, a task made more pleasant by listening to the radio. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s All Points West was on the air. An aged piece of pipe, part of an Enbridge line running through some wetlands close to Kalamazoo Michigan, had just ruptured and was sending a projected million gallons of oil down the Kalamazoo River. The media was swarming over the story like flies on a rotting moose carcass.
“The oil spill,” said one reporter, “is expected to cause long-term damage to at least a 30-mile stretch of once pristine marshes along the river, destroying habitat for resident geese, ducks, frogs, herons, muskrats and swans for possibly years to come.”
“It is feared the oil may contaminate the city’s water supply,” reported another.
Apropos of all this, All Points West had rounded up a PR hack for BIG OIL and persuaded him to take time away from his busy schedule, which no doubt includes mounting campaigns to convince people that climate change doesn’t exist. The shill bellied up to the microphone and crowed about how his bosses had significantly reduced the number of pipeline accidents and how pipelines are the safest way to transport oil. He added that the company had deployed its response teams and cleanup was well underway.
PR people are paid liars purposely hired to obfuscate issues to divert our attention from the damage their bosses are doing to us. This amoral twerp was no exception. He knows as well as anyone that when it comes to oil pipeline ruptures, the rate is not the issue unless it’s zero. There are 3,858 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. How many have blown out? Well, just one, the Deepwater Horizon, causing the largest spill in US history, one that, according to conservative estimates, puked 20 million barrels of oil into the sea. But, hey, the blowout rate at 1 to 3,858, is really low.
When the PR hack had spieled, All Points West had the mayor of Kalamazoo queued up.
“How was the company’s response to the spill?” asked the host.
“Anemic,” said the mayor.
Oil is ridiculously difficult to mop up. I heard this from Dr. Jeep Rice, a comparative physiologist and toxicologist who has spent a large chunk of his career studying the downstream of the Exxon Valdez spill on the ground in Prince William Sound for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the US. His message to all of us attending a conference at SFU on the effects of oil on fish, was that the deleterious effects of the contamination continue for decades. Ultimately, you can never adequately clean up an oil spill. No tanker spill in history has been cleaned up successfully. What happens instead is we operate according to the unsatisfactory principle that the solution to pollution is dilution. We look the other way as another toxic burden is added to our air and watersheds. The best anyone can do is mitigate the effects of a spill, and mitigation is just damage control.
The feature on All Points West made me start thinking about damage control. Doing that in Kalamazoo proved too difficult for Enbridge. Kalamazoo is a town with four times as many people as Terrace. The land is flat. There are roads everywhere. Still, according to all reports, Enbridge’s response corps fumbled the ball. This should give us pause because the country through which Enbridge plans to thread its Gateway pipe is a little more rugged than Kalamazoo Michigan. Much of it has no roads, and some of it is as close to being straight up and down as you can get and is subject to avalanche and slides.
So, imagine that the Gateway Pipeline project is complete. It’s 30 below late in a Feb. day. The snow high up in the valley of the Clore River is three metres deep. The crudest oil on the planet is pumping through one of the pipes from Alberta toward the coast at Kitimat. Condensate, a thinner, is pumping through the other pipe in the opposite direction. A giant avalanche breaks free of its moorings above the Clore Valley and roars down one of the many slide chutes, not a rare event. It tears both pipes apart and buries a kilometre of the line in a hundred feet of rock and snow. Oil and condensate starts hemorrhaging into the landscape.
The only access to the frozen site is by helicopter, but the weather must be favourable: the winds moderate, the visibility good, and whether a chopper can be landed in that rugged terrain is moot.
Will the response team based in Burns Lake, some of them veterans of the 2010 spill in Kalamazoo, be up to the task of stanching the toxic spill and cleaning up the mess?